Keynote Address: Mary Callahan Erdoes, CEO, JPMorgan Chase's Asset & Wealth Management

Keynote Introduction Sponsored By: Appian

Keynote address by Mary Callahan Erdoes, Chief Executive Officer at JPMorgan Chase's Asset and Wealth Management.

Transcription:

Alexis Kane (00:06):

Awesome. Well, hi everyone again. Good afternoon for those of you who were not here a part of the earlier session. My name is Alexis Kane and I am a Senior Solutions Consultant at Appian. I am absolutely humbled and honored to get the opportunity today to present our keynote speaker for this afternoon session. Mary Callahan Erdoes, the Chief Executive Officer of JP Morgan Chase's asset and wealth management division. In a world where the banking industry is constantly evolving, Mary has consistently demonstrated unwavering leadership and resilience. Her remarkable career at JP Morgan Chase spans over 25 years during which she has rose up the corporate ladder of one of the largest and most esteemed and investment managers and private banks in the world. As CEO of JP Morgan Chase's asset and wealth management line of business, Mary is responsible for 4.6 trillion in client assets and upholds the accountability of a 200 year old legacy as a trusted fiduciary to corporations, governments, institutions, and individuals.

(01:19)

Mary is also a part of JP Morgan Chase's operating committee, the firm's most senior management team. Under her leadership, the division has achieved record breaking results with client assets and assets under management, both up by 20% and 16% respectively year over year. Mary's dedication to maintaining high standards has not been without effort. Her division's profits have soared and she continues to set new records year after year. In addition to her professional accomplishments, Mary serves on the boards of the US-China Business Council and the Robinhood Foundation of New York City. She's also a board member of Georgetown University where she earned her mathematics and in her undergraduate degree and serves on the Global Advisory Council of Harvard University where she received her MBA. Mary embodies the qualities of a remarkable leader, resilience, dedication, innovation, and a commitment to the greater good. Her impressive journeys and contributions to the financial world and society at large truly make her an exceptional leader and role model. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Mary.

Mary Callahan Erdoes (02:44):

Okay, end of the day. Let's have a little fun while we're here. Thank you so much for the very sweet introduction, but let's just first take one second to look outside the window, see where we're sitting. It's an absolutely beautiful day. We'll be out of here in no time and American Banker does all of this for us. They do this for us and I think that Mary Ellen and Chana and her whole team need a massive round of applause for spoiling us.

(03:25)

It is been 10 years since I have been fortunate enough to be part of the American banker list of people that get awarded and I think back like 10 years ago, they were the only people thinking about us and how to highlight us and how to bring us together and how to have these conversations. And they haven't wavered. They didn't waver through Covid. They kept this thing going. And the best part about being here is being with all of you tomorrow night. Hopefully everyone can make it back. It's going to be a lot of fun and we get to even get more dressed up, but it's about meeting the people. And over these past 10 years, I've met so many people. There's so many familiar faces in the audience. I just congratulated Diane and team on the fabulous panel that they were just up here.

(04:15)

There's just so many great things. So anyway, I thought after 10 years of getting this wonderful award, I would do a top 10 list. And then Louise, who's my truth teller, part of my team, she's like, eh, that's like, I don't know, kind of predictable, do something else. How about the Erdoes eight? Shorten the list a little. So she's like, all right, do eight things. So I said, all right, I'll do eight. Sort of just lessons learned I guess over the many years that have sort of served me well and kept me going and things that I share with other people. And so I have eight, maybe someday I'll laminate them and hand them out to the people that come and decide is JP Morgan that care? But let me start with the first one.

(05:00)

The reason that I think I'm here today is because somewhere early in my career I learned how to be a Subject Matter Expert. I tell every single analyst who enters in to JP Morgan on their very first day coming out of college, you all remember your very first day. It doesn't matter that you don't know anything of what these people are talking about. Nothing. You just need to find one thing and become a subject matter expert. And when you do, you will figure out that a boss will see that and a boss will lift you up through this organization. And if you keep doing that time and time again, you will do it. And I remember when I was an analyst at Bankers Trust way back when, and I Googled it last night to see Microsoft 2.0 had just come out and at the end of being a first year analyst, Microsoft 3.0 came out and it was when the toolbar came and you could push a button and create a graph, and I was like, this is it.

(06:01)

This will save me so many hours. So I figured out how to master Microsoft Excel and that was my thing. And a month or two later, I found myself on the border that had just opened up between East Germany and West Germany, and they had sent me over as a 22 and a half year old to run an investment banking deal. And I'd still look back thinking, how did that happen? That's impossible, but it's because someone saw that I did that and could pull me up. I remember the second example of that, which was when I first came to JP Morgan and they made me a junior portfolio manager on a fixed income and I had no idea what they were talking about on half of the stuff. And so I said, I can figure out the cash part, I can figure out, I think I can get that.

(06:49)

And I would've obsess about the off the runt bill and on the runt Bill and all this crazy stuff. And I found a friend who was the trader and his name was John Donahue, and I went to John Donahue every day. This account needs $5 more of this. And he's like, lady, you're making me crazy. Anyway, fast forward to the great financial crisis. The great financial crisis was caused by money market funds. The two of us, JD and I, were called to sit in the room as we went through the first Bear Stearns weekend and then all the rest of it. And about two months after the great financial crisis, I was put on the operating committee of the firm and JD runs the largest money market fund complex in the world. So you just think about these little seeds of what gets you up.

(07:42)

The chain of command is really just those things and it's always finding that next thing you're going to be a subject matter expert on and constantly being curious about it. So that's thing one. Thing two, there's a saying that one of my dear friends who's been through a lot of surgeries in her life, Terry, she's on her 20th, she just had it in August to these are all replacement surgeries, surgeries to replace bones, hips, things. She had Lyme's disease very early on when they didn't have a cure for it. And she said, the following line, which I live by often, if you can't get out of it, get really into it. She knows everything about these hospitals, the doctors, the whole thing. And she said, it's not that saying of it's not what happens to you, it's how you deal with it. She said, that's not really it.

(08:36)

It's what happens to you, what your attitude is, how you're going through it, and if you have the right attitude, it will be okay. And I have two examples that I think about. I told you I didn't know what I was doing when I started in fixed income at JP Morgan. Worse than that, they put me on Munis and then they put me on Muni research. I couldn't even trade Munis. They were just like you research Munis. I don't know if any of you have ever done that. I made it the equivalent of equities in Dallas. Does anyone remember that term? Equities in Dallas was the liars poker line for those of you who are too young, look it up. I looked it up last night in Investopedia or something. It says it's the definition of the lowest form of human scum where you send people to bury them.

(09:29)

That was equities in Dallas. That was me in Munis. But I didn't care. I couldn't get out of it. I was going to get really into it. And I knew everything about every default in Munis, the number of issuers, the issues, everything that was current in market, the things that had gone wrong, the things that people needed, the tax rates of every single human being and state and what had changed and the history of them. And it got me into almost every client meeting because while everyone else was focused on their hedge funds and their equities and everyone still needed munis, and so they would call me to go. And so that was really one of the turning points of my life was to learn how to focus in on it. And I fast forward to this year, the new incoming class of analysts, 400 of them just in my division, a crazy amount of people.

(10:21)

They came in and we were in the middle of the regional banking crisis and we had a queue of 60,000 accounts that had come into the bank, but you all know we don't want to talk about banking stuff up here. We had to do KYC on them in a very short period of time. I had 60,000 KYC's that had to be done before the regulators wanted to come in like 45 days later. And I looked at the sea of 400 analysts and I said, we're all going to do account opening as our first thing and I'm going to send you to Dallas. No joke. No joke, because we have this large location in Plano, Texas, which is Dallas, and we sent them to Dallas and the looks on their faces like, you're joking, right? You're going to send me to Dallas for my career, blah, blah. Anyway, it was one of those, if you can't get out of it, get really into it. Not everybody got really into it. I got complaints about like, are you going to carry the gym membership to Dallas that I just paid for here? What? No, you're going to Dallas to do a job and we're paying you for your hotel room, so just go enjoy it.

(11:26)

And I watched and all of a sudden you could see the little me, all of these people, they all look the same except for a few start to bubble up. They're there earlier. They stay later, they're really curious. They learn about it a little bit more. They start teaching other people. And there's this woman, grace, she was in the analyst class and Grace was like it. Now Grace three months later is the go-to person on everything. She's on our equivalent of Good Morning America and JP Morgan. We have this morning meeting thing. She's been on the morning meeting several times. People call her, they go to her and it's fabulous. So if you can't get out of it, get really into it. Mistakes. This is a quick one, but it's also a really important one. Whenever you make a mistake, obviously you own up to it.

(12:14)

My first major mistake at JP Morgan, I was finally managing a high yield part of the portfolio. I had moved up in the world and I lost somebody. I think it was like $20 million an individual in the mark to market of the bonds in 1998. And all I wanted to do was hide under my desk or hand the portfolio to somebody else or just wish it away. All the things that normally happen. And again, long story short, I don't even know why I don't think anyone told me, but I got on a plane, I flew to Louisiana, I sat in front of the client and I was like, there's no other way to tell you this, but I have lost you this amount of money, some of these we will be able to hold and they'll probably come back, some might not. I'm going to need to sell them.

(13:02)

We are going to realize that loss and I take full responsibility and I'm going to work my ass off between now and however long it takes to earn your trust back. And 25 years later, he's like one of the largest clients of ours, a great friend we talk, he talks about football with my husband every weekend. And it's just one of those things where you say to yourself, I have to set an example. If we're going to make mistakes, then we're going to show people how to do it. Now, of course, I think that's all they call me on is mistakes and errors and then that's what they do to you and you have to pick up. But if you can do it and you can show people how to deal with it, you get them through it. And I think it's a really, really important thing that I'm not going to ask you to do something that I wouldn't do myself. And so let's go and deal with this hard difficult situation together and then you'll move on. So mistakes are a gift. You just don't want to spoil yourselves with them.

(14:01)

Number four, hyper organized. This is my 16 years of working directly for Jamie Diamond. He somehow manages 300,000 people. So my 30,000 direct reports look like a walk in the park relative to what he does, and I have the really good fortune of sitting right near him and watch the way that he operates on a daily basis. And there are three things that he does religiously that all of you know why I just repeat them. Mostly for the younger people in the room, 24 hour rule on phone calls, there should be no phone call that doesn't get returned within a 24 hour period. I don't think he's ever gone more than two hours, but it's a pretty stunning thing that he can be flying all around the world and it just cascades right through the organization that you have to call people back within 24 hours. And the harder one he has is emails open it once.

(15:01)

How many times have you opened an email and closed it and just marked it on red as if that never happened? And then somehow it's just magically going to go away. The longer I just leave it in that inbox, I'm hoping and praying it'll go away. Someone will just say, just joking. I don't need you to deal with that. He says, open it once. Deal with it right there. It doesn't age well. And when you can really focus yourself to open at once, deal with it because you're slowing down the organization. If you're not because you're in a position where people are coming to you and needing all of that so open at once. Good luck with that. Lemme know if you master it. And then calendar management. I love the saying you're looking at your calendar and I'm looking at my watch. I wrote it down, I think it's fabulous.

(15:49)

Jamie is relentless at calendar management. We are already discussing and arguing about December 21st. Okay, December 21st for a business review of 2024. He wants it on December 21st. Why do you want it on December 21st? Can't it be a little earlier? Doesn't that sound like a horrible time to have a business review? I don't want it on December 21st. I want it earlier. And this is how religious he is with the calendar and everything that we manage so that we know what's happening so that it operates like a finely tuned machine. And when you do that, your whole organization follows suit. So I think it's pretty relentless. The last thing I will say is that he's always said when you call an office or when you deal with someone else's office, the office itself is a representation of the person your office is a representation of you. And I just have one little thing I will share that is sort of a pet peeve of mine and hopefully of all of yours. This work from home thing, which is the greatest gift and I'll talk about it in a minute, is also this crazy thing. And it just happened to me this morning, even though I had written this down a week or two ago as one of the things I wanted to share because it's a representation of your office. You call someone's office. I did it this morning to someone in JP Morgan, not one of your companies. So you're safe. And I said, is so-and-So there she's working from home. Do you want me to connect you?

(17:21)

No. I was calling to take a poll this morning about would you have said that if she was sitting in her cubicle or in her office, would you have said, would you like me to connect you? Would those words have come out of your mouth? No. Why are you making it my problem? Now you're making me feel like, do I really want to intrude on this person that I'm calling? Like, yes, I called for a reason and I'd like to talk to this person. And it's a whole sort of weird ecosystem. The same thing with you. Don't get back. You don't RSVP, all those things are really important and they're a symbol of who you are. And obsessing about making it better is a really important thing for all of us because it reflects on us while we're here doing these things and flying around the country or around the world and doing lots of things and we need to constantly hone in on those.

(18:12)

So I think all of that stuff is really important. Alright, number five, what got you here isn't going to get you there. How many of you have changed jobs? How many of you have moved up in the organization? How many of you are here because you are a super fabulous person at your company and people are moving you up through the organization pretty fast, everybody. And generally speaking, those transitions are rough. And the most important thing I think is that you need somebody who's a truth teller. You have to have a truth teller in your life. I have a truth teller in the back of the room, Darren, he's sitting right there. Darren, I'll say, Darren, I would like to go do such and such, or I would like to say whatever. And he goes, no words don't even come out of his mouth. I guess that's a no. Yeah, that's a no. How did I do today, Darren?

(19:14)

Okay, everyone else will say, great, how'd you do today? Great. When you walk out of a meeting and you say, oh, tell me how did you think that was? What is the natural answer of any normal nice person? Great. There's only one word that comes out of people's mouth. Great. But if you want feedback, nobody wants feedback. Feedback is a gift. Yeah, that's another one you shouldn't spoil yourself with. Feedback is a gift, but you don't really want it, but you need it at certain times. So you need truth tellers in your life who feels safe and secure giving you that feedback and that you can take that feedback and move on. Jimmy Lee, who worked at JP Morgan and was a very famous banker for many years one time told me when I was making a big jump onto the operating committee of the firm, he said, you're like a hot mess and you're not cool and you're not like making anyone feel good about the situation here.

(20:14)

You need to be a duck. You just be a duck and whatever happens under here is totally fine. I don't care what you do and how hard it takes you to get to making it all look calm, but you need to make it look calm. You be a duck. And the second person that gave me that feedback over a pretty big transition was Gordon Smith who used to be at Amex for many of you who are there and then ran Chase Bank for us. And it was at the very beginning of Covid and all of a sudden we had a slew of money coming in and things were breaking and we were all trying to operate from home. All of us were going through the same things. And he said, Hey, guess what? You know that muscle of yours that's super strong being in front of clients managing money, guess what?

(21:00)

Stop exercising that muscle right now. Just stop. Let other people do that. You better get that other muscle going. The one where you have to obsess about tech ops controls. We've got $8 trillion moving through this bank every single day and we're all doing it from home. And you really got to know where this stuff could go very wrong. And we have to figure out if we have to operate from a far for a distance and I need you to do it. I didn't work for him. Why was he doing that? He cared. And I hopefully was vulnerable enough to let him sort of share that. But I think it's really important that feedback, as bad as it is, you have to find those people that can absorb it from you. Alright, there's people standing here, so maybe I only have six, seven, and eight. It's a good thing I only have eight.

(21:55)

This one's from my husband. Take your job seriously, but not yourself. You have to be your authentic self. You've got to be real. You've got to be like just who you are. You can't try to be this perfect wonderful thing. You have to be yourself. You think to yourself, just think back to high school. Everything comes from high school. Pick these two people in your head. Maybe you didn't have a prom queen. Maybe you did, but the equivalent of the prom queen. Pick that person in your head and then pick the other person of that super hardworking person who was really trying to get great grades and you were really hoping them to get into the school that they wanted to get into and you were genuinely excited about how well they were doing. Which of those two people did you like to root for and which of those two people were you annoyed by most of the time, right? Because the person who was working hard was genuinely like, I'm just working really hard and I'm making it really obvious. I want to get good grades and I want to get into this college and not like this perfect fake generally if anyone's a prom queen here, I'm sorry.

(23:13)

And so just be your real self. This is all hard to do. It's hard to show up and be all the things that we are. And the more genuine you are, the more people want to follow you, the more fabulous it is. I came home two weeks ago from the one of the things that we were doing, and I had the really amazing fortune of being in a room of 10 people with President Zelensky and I came home and there's my 16-year-old, the only person I have to tell. And so I'm so excited to tell this story. I'm like, okay. So she's like, whatever this is, I'm sure it's really important, but could you do it over the irony board? Because tomorrow is picture day and I really, the skirt is like a mess. I'm like, sure, let's go get the ironing board. The story wasn't that important anyway and you move on.

(24:10)

But they keep it real and that's most important. Alright, nine and 10. Number nine, if you missed Peggy op-Ed piece on dressing the part, please get it. Or maybe American Banker will send it out to us. It's fabulous. It is exactly what this room looks like right now. Everybody showed up here for all the same reasons that she wrote. She didn't write it about us. She wrote it about Congress or a Congress person or senator wearing shorts and said, you dress the part for three reasons. One, you have respect for the institution that you work for.

(24:52)

It's as simple as that. Two, you have respect for yourself. You wake up in the morning and you're proud to spend a little bit of extra time investing in yourself so that you look the way this room does. And not every room around this city looks the way this room does. And three, it's out of respect for everybody else in the room or in the institution. You are not above them. You don't get like a special hall pass. You respect that. They are also really hardworking. And I always say to people, if you go to a doctor, you're handing them your body, your health, and you're saying, please give me advice. It's no different than what we all do in this room in finance. They come to us with their company or their individual or their pension fund, and they're asking us for help on their, I don't want to go to a doctor that's wearing a T-shirt and jeans and doesn't look like they're respecting the institution.

(25:50)

They're respecting themselves or they're respecting me and my time. And it's a really important thing that we carry forward. And there is nobody more important in the world to do that than the women of the world that make the whole place just shine a little bit brighter. And this room is a fabulous example of that. I've already wanted to walk up to two or three people and say, where did you get that jacket? It's really cool. So I think that that's really important and it's a really important sign of everything we do. And the last and final piece is what I would call Wall Street 2.0. Since the day I was able to get on a plane in July of 2020 and land in these different cities, I started telling the groups of people, I think we are embarking on Wall Street 2.0 that's a much better Wall Street than the one that some of us grew up in.

(26:43)

Everything is better. Everything zoom changed everything. All of the reasons that we have to be in this room because we're celebrating women, they weren't celebrated for years before is because we didn't have that flexibility. And it was impossible to keep the face time up with dealing with things at home. And for whatever reason, there was just a lot that fell on the shoulders of people that were also trying to raise families or to take care of elder parents. And for whatever reason, it generally more fell on women and women would opt out of the workforce and then they're just, the funnel wasn't enough. And Wall Street 2.0 changes everything. Zoom makes it okay to be in the office for whatever hours you want to be in and then do a zoom from wherever you want. And it's all okay. And when I look at the young people that are in this room, this is your chance and it's our chance, the people that had to live through maybe a different world to not let this go away, that doesn't mean there's any substitute for in-person face being together with each other.

(27:54)

Look how much better this room is than if you were watching it on a screen. You'd be phasing out, you'd be doing emails, whatever, all that stuff because we can have real connections. I can look and have eye contact and you know that I'm talking to you and then we can have casual conversation about things. All those things are really important, but not 24 hours a day. And I will tell you that it is a very precarious spot you put women in when you try to make them have the old fashioned FaceTime and all of that. And I think back to this story, it still haunts me today of trying to get myself through the raising the child years, but also trying to be an executive catching up on my work. It wasn't that I couldn't find a babysitter, it's that I didn't want a babysitter.

(28:41)

Anyone who has had children maybe goes through this whole guilt thing of like, I don't want the babysitter, I want the kid to be with me, but I have to go to work. So I would bring my girls into work on Saturdays when I got the new job of being on the operating committee with Jamie some, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, 15 years ago. I would still do the same thing, but it sort of didn't dawn on me that I was on his floor. And it never dawned on me that he would be in on a Saturday. And my little 6-year-old decides to wander the floor and he walks down the floor with her to deliver her back to my office. And he says she's really good at doing handstands. She did several of them in my office for me.

(29:36)

I was absolutely sure that was the end of the nice career that I had at JP Morgan. And honest to God, she's now a gymnast at UCLA. Every time I get on a plane to go to a meet, he goes, remember the time? Yes, I remember the time. It's pretty horrible. But hopefully we don't have to do that. Hopefully we don't have to put people in precarious situations like that. Hopefully this is our future where we are not talking about FaceTime and all that. We're going to have Wall Street 2.0. It's going to be a place where you don't think, oh, should my child have a career in Wall Street? Because it's so horrible because of the FaceTime because it's two in the morning stuff. Anyone who has their groups in at two in the morning doing the checking of the periods and the commas on the pitch book is ridiculous.

(30:24)

You can do that from home and it shouldn't be that way anymore. And it's our job to keep it that way. And it's one of the greatest parts, I think any of the industries that you can come to because look at what we have in this room and what we've created and the conversations that were up here today about all the great things that people can do and helping clients and helping them to manage their money the right way, giving them delightful client experiences, powering them with the technology that all of the great people are doing, and the small acquisitions that people are making to be able to infuse it into their 150 year old companies. It's all really fun, really exciting. I think finance is the best place to be. I think being in a Women in Finance is a really fabulous place to be, and I'm super excited to celebrate with everybody tomorrow night, hopefully with new outfits on so I can see everybody else's outfit. But I'm really thankful to American Banker to be able to do this, and it is something we look forward to every single year. We love it. I hope everybody else does, and it's about celebrating together. So thank you all. Have a great afternoon. Get outside and enjoy the sun.